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any attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to
define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general
terms, to find some universal formula for it. The value of these
attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating
things said by the way. Such discussions help us very little to
enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate
between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use
words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise
meaning than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all other
qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the
definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to
its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in
the most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal
formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or
that [vii/viii] special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student
of aesthetics.

"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to
be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic
criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is,
is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it,
to realise it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism
deals--music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human
life--are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they
possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities.
What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented
in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on
me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of
pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under
its influence? The answers to these questions are the original
facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study
of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data
for one's self, or not at all. And he who experiences these
impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination
and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the
abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact
relation to truth or [viii/ix] experience--metaphysical questions, as
unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass
them all by as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him.

The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he
has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and
human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations,
each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind. This influence he
feels, and wishes to explain, by analysing and reducing it to its
elements. To him, the picture, the landscape, the engaging
personality in life or in a book, La Gioconda, the hills of Carrara,
Pico of Mirandola, are valuable for their virtues, as we say, in
speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem; for the property each has of
affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure.
Our education becomes complete in proportion as our
susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety.
And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to
analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a
picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book,
produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate
what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions
it is experienced. His end is reached when he has disengaged that
[ix/x] virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element,
for himself and others; and the rule for those who would reach
this end is stated with great exactness in the words of a recent
critic of Sainte-Beuve:--De se borner ř connaËtre de pr╦s les
belles choses, et ř s'en nourrir en exquis amateurs, en
humanistes accomplis.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a
correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain
kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the
presence of beautiful objects. He will remember always that
beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods, types, schools
of taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there have been
some excellent workmen, and some excellent work done. The
question he asks is always:--In whom did the stir, the genius, the
sentiment of the period find itself? where was the receptacle of
its refinement, its elevation, its taste? "The ages are all equal,"
says William Blake, "but genius is always above its age."
Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the
commoner elements with which it may be found in combination.
Few artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly,
casting off all débris, and leaving us only what the heat of their
imagination has wholly [x/xi] fused and transformed. Take, for
instance, the writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his genius,
entering into the substance of his work, has crystallised a part,
but only a part, of it; and in that great mass of verse there is much
which might well be forgotten. But scattered up and down it,
sometimes fusing and transforming entire compositions, like the
Stanzas on Resolution and Independence, or the Ode on the
Recollections of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random,
depositing a fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not
wholly search through and transmute, we trace the action of his
unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a
life in natural things, and of man's life as a part of nature,
drawing strength and colour and character from local influences,
from the hills and streams, and from natural sights and sounds.
Well! that is the virtue, the active principle in Wordsworth's
poetry; and then the function of the critic of Wordsworth is to
follow up that active principle, to disengage it, to mark the degree
in which it penetrates his verse.

The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history
of the Renaissance, and touch what I think the chief points in that
complex, many-sided movement. I have explained in the first of
them what I understand by the word, [xi/xii] giving it a much wider
scope than was intended by those who originally used it to denote
that revival of classical antiquity in the fifteenth century which
was only one of many results of a general excitement and
enlightening of the human mind, but of which the great aim and
achievements of what, as Christian art, is often falsely opposed to
the Renaissance, were another result. This outbreak of the human
spirit may be traced far into the middle age itself, with its motives
already clearly pronounced, the care for physical beauty, the
worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the
religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and the
imagination. I have taken as an example of this movement, this
earlier Renaissance within the middle age itself, and as an
expression of its qualities, two little compositions in early
French; not because they constitute the best possible expression
of them, but because they help the unity of my series, inasmuch
as the Renaissance ends also in France, in French poetry, in a
phase of which the writings of Joachim du Bellay are in many
ways the most perfect illustration. The Renaissance, in truth, put
forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the
products of which have to the full that subtle and delicate
sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely [xii/xiii]
decadence, just as its earliest phases have the freshness which
belongs to all periods of growth in art, the charm of asc═sis, of
the austere and serious girding of the loins in youth.

But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of the
Renaissance mainly lies,--in that solemn fifteenth century which
can hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results
in the things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete
works of art, its special and prominent personalities, with their
profound aesthetic charm, but for its general spirit and character,
for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type.

The various forms of intellectual activity which together make
up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different
starting-points, and by unconnected roads. As products of the
same generation they partake indeed of a common character, and
unconsciously illustrate each other; but of the producers
themselves, each group is solitary, gaining what advantage or
disadvantage there may be in intellectual isolation. Art and
poetry, philosophy and the religious life, and that other life of
refined pleasure and action in the conspicuous places of the
world, are each of them confined to its own circle of ideas, and
those who prosecute either of them are generally little [xiii/xiv]
curious of the thoughts of others. There come, however, from
time to time, eras of more favourable conditions, in which the
thoughts of men draw nearer together than is their wont, and the
many interests of the intellectual world combine in one complete
type of general culture. The fifteenth century in Italy is one of
these happier eras, and what is sometimes said of the age of
Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo:--it is an age productive in
personalities, many-sided, centralised, complete. Here, artists
and philosophers and those whom the action of the world has
elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a
common air, and catch light and heat from each other's thoughts.
There is a spirit of general elevation and enlightenment in which
all alike communicate. The unity of this spirit gives unity to all
the various products of the Renaissance; and it is to this intimate
alliance with the mind, this participation in the best thoughts
which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth
century owes much of its grave dignity and influence.

I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not incongruous with
the studies which precede it, because Winckelmann, coming in
the eighteenth century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age.
By his enthusiasm for the things of the intellect [xiv/xv] and the
imagination for their own sake, by his Hellenism, his life-long
struggle to attain the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the
humanists of a previous century. He is the last fruit of the
Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive and
tendencies.